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Choreography is writing on your feet.

When you shoot a musical, you're shooting to lipsynch tracks, so we had to figure out our choreography and work out what we wanted to do with each number before we did it.

The costumes had to serve the choreography.

I had always choreographed a little, beginning in high school. And I leaned toward choreography. I always had an overview of what was going on.

Well, for me, the real excitement of doing physical things in films, whether you're talking about a fight scene or a stunt sequence or even a love scene, for that matter, is by necessity it has to be choreographed very much like a dance. That being said, you have to rehearse it over and over again and find a mathematical precision.

I approach an action sequence almost like a mathematical problem. Sometimes you get these action sequences that you read and go, 'Oh my God, this is huge, how do I do it?' and I go, 'Just a step at a time. Sit down and plot each piece of it out.'

Maybe because I come from choreography, I've always felt that there's something about action films that made it very natural for me to go that way. It's story through movement.

You really get to direct the movie three times when it comes to the action sequences and the set pieces.

In one take, I had to do 24 combat sequences, which is hard. It makes you think, 'I'd better get on my toes again.'

It's very hard to do that many things at the same time - having to dance and sing and be on a horse with a sword. It does get quite confusing.